William Alexander Spicer v The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Mr Justice Warby |
| Judgment Date | 07 June 2019 |
| Neutral Citation | [2019] EWHC 1439 (QB) |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division |
| Docket Number | Case No: HQ18M00307 |
| Date | 07 June 2019 |
[2019] EWHC 1439 (QB)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS LIST
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
THE HONOURABLE Mr Justice Warby
Case No: HQ18M00307
Robert Sterling (instructed by Carruthers Law) for the Claimant
Gervase de Wilde (instructed by Legal Directorate, Metropolitan Police Service) for Defendant
Hearing date: 5 June 2019
Approved Judgment
I direct that pursuant to CPR PD 39A para 6.1 no official shorthand note shall be taken of this Judgment and that copies of this version as handed down may be treated as authentic.
THE HONOURABLE Mr Justice Warby
The article complained of in this libel action was headed “Two guilty of killing a woman while racing their cars”. In the body of the article, the reader was told that the claimant was one of the two racers, and that he had been found guilty by a jury. But the reader was also told that whilst both men had faced a charge of causing death by dangerous driving, as well as one of causing serious injury by dangerous driving, the claimant had been acquitted of both those charges, and convicted of careless driving. It was the other man, Farid Reza, who was convicted of causing death and causing serious injury by dangerous driving. The reader was told that, for his offending, Reza was sentenced to five years and three months' imprisonment for the killing and three years' concurrent for the serious injury, as well as being disqualified from driving. The claimant, it was reported, was fined £1,000, given nine penalty points, and ordered to pay costs of £500.
This has been the trial of the issue of meaning, as a preliminary issue in the action. The main issue for resolution, putting it broadly, is whether the headline encapsulates or reflects the natural and ordinary meaning of the article, read as a whole. Put another way, does the article mean that the claimant was one of two found “guilty of killing a woman while racing their cars”? The answer is that it does not. Established legal principle holds that the meaning of a published article or statement must be collected from the article or statement as a whole. The law does not permit a claimant to sue for damages in respect of a headline, however defamatory, if the headline and article are mismatched, and the impact of the headline is contradicted or neutralised by the remainder of the article. That is this case.
Parties
The claimant is William Alexander Spicer, described in the Particulars of Claim as a respectable and widely-liked young man who was, at the relevant times, studying at Kingston University and living in the Harrow area.
The defendant is the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis. She is sued on the basis that she is responsible in law for the operation of the website located at www.news.met.police.uk. This, as its name suggests, is the news website for the Metropolitan police. Judging by the article complained of, it appears to operate in a similar way to an online newspaper. I shall call it the “Met Website”.
The article
The article complained of was published on the Met Website on 26 January 2017. According to the Particulars of Claim, it was also re-published by the defendant, by tweeting links to it.
I have set out in the Appendix to this judgment the full text of the article, which runs to 36 paragraphs in all. The paragraph numbers have been helpfully added by the parties.
The claimant has selected words for complaint “including in particular the headline”. In addition to the headline, the claimant complains of 7 paragraphs of the body of the article. I have underlined all the words complained of.
The case for the defendant is that not only the headline but all the first 23 paragraphs of the article have some relevance. The concluding section of the article, paragraphs [25] to [36], sets out in great detail the content of a victim personal statement made to the Court by the father of the deceased woman. Nobody has suggested that this has any bearing on the meaning of the article for present purposes, but it is right to include it in the Appendix nonetheless.
I have been provided with screen shots of the article as it appeared on the website, with the illustrative photographs. It is clear to any reader of the article that it is a publication made by or on behalf of the Metropolitan police. The screenshots time the publication at 17:21. This appears to have been a short time after the verdicts of the jury, and the sentencing decisions of the Judge, all of which were delivered earlier that same day.
Procedural history
The action was begun by claim form issued just within the limitation period, on 25 January 2018. The Claim Form and Particulars of Claim were served on 24 May 2018, just within the four-month limit provided for by the CPR. On 12 July 2018, Master Kay QC made an order by consent that there be tried as a preliminary issue “the question of what meaning the words in the publication complained of at paragraph 5 of the Particulars of Claim bear of the claimant.” It has been agreed that I should determine what natural and ordinary defamatory meaning is borne by the words.
The rival cases as to meaning
The meaning attributed to the words complained of by the claimant was first set out in a letter dated 13 November 2017, complaining that he had been very seriously libelled by the Article in the following meaning:
“William Spicer and Farid Reza have been found guilty by a jury of unlawfully killing a young woman pedestrian, Hina Shamin, at about 9pm on 31 st March 2015 while recklessly racing their high performance BMWs against each other at more than 60 mph in a 30 mph zone in Kingston town centre. Spicer also failed to stop and illegally drove on. He was later found by the Police, charged and arrested.”
This is the meaning complained of in the Particulars of Claim, with the immaterial change that the spelling of Mr Reza's name has been corrected.
The meaning advanced by the defendant in correspondence, and in the application for the determination of the issue at this hearing, was that:
“There are reasonable grounds to suspect that [the Claimant] was involved in racing his high-performance car against another similar vehicle at more than 60 mph in a 30 mph zone in Kingston Town Centre. The other vehicle struck a young woman, Hina Shamin, who was killed instantly, and its driver was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving. The Claimant failed to stop at the site of the collision, and then made an illegal right-hand turn. He was arrested the following day and charged with causing death by dangerous driving, and causing serious injury by dangerous driving. He was found not guilty of those two offences, but guilty of careless driving, and was given nine penalty points on his licence, a £1,000 fine, and ordered to pay £500 costs.”
In the course of argument at this trial, and in response to questions from me, Mr Sterling has expanded on the claimant's case in relation to arrest and charge. He has submitted that the implication of the report of arrest and charge is that there were reasonable grounds to suspect the claimant of the offences in question. Mr de Wilde has not sought to quarrel with that approach.
The approach to deciding defamatory meaning
The common law test of what is defamatory is not controversial. I summarised it recently in Allen v Times Newspapers [2019] EWHC (QB) [19]:
“(1) At common law, a statement is defamatory of the claimant if, but only if, (a) it imputes conduct which would tend to lower the claimant in the estimation of right-thinking people generally, and (b) the imputation crosses the common law threshold of seriousness, which is that it “[substantially] affects in an adverse manner the attitude of other people towards him or has a tendency so to do”: Thornton v Telegraph Media Group Limited [2010] EWHC 1414 (QB) [2011] 1 WLR 1985 [96] (Tugendhat J).
(2) “Although the word ‘affects’ in this formulation might suggest otherwise, it is not necessary to establish that the attitude of any individual person towards the claimant has in fact been adversely affected to a substantial extent, or at all. It is only necessary to prove that the meaning conveyed by the words has a tendency to cause such a consequence”: Lachaux v Independent Print Limited [2015] EWHC 2242 (QB) [2016] QB 402 [15(5)].”
In this case, all the meanings proposed by the parties are agreed to be defamatory meanings, by these criteria.
The Court's function at a trial such as this is to identify “what is the natural and ordinary meaning of the Article, as it relates to the claimant”: Allen v Times Newspapers Ltd [2019] EWHC 1235 (QB) [39]. The principles to be applied are conveniently collected in the recent judgment of Nicklin J in Koutsogiannis v The Random House Group Limited [2019] EWHC 48 (QB) at [11–13]. It is unnecessary to rehearse them all here. They are not controversial in any way. My task is to apply them to the facts of the particular case.
But in every case, some principles will be more pertinent than others. Here, I have had in mind, in particular, principles (viii) and (xi) in the Koutsogiannis canon. Principle (viii), the “bane and antidote” principle, was summarised in this way by Nicklin J:-
“The publication must be read as a whole, and any “bane and antidote” taken together. Sometimes, the context will clothe the words in a more serious defamatory meaning (for example the classic “rogues' gallery” case). In other cases, the context will weaken (even extinguish altogether) the defamatory meaning that the words bear if they were read in isolation (e.g. bane and antidote cases).”
The time-honoured language of “bane and antidote”...
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